Red Hat and Oracle, Jails, Encrypted Email Cookbook, and TiVo

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Red Hat and Oracle, Jails, Encrypted Email Cookbook, and TiVo

by chromatic
Linux Newsletter for 09/08/2003

Hello, on an overcast Portland afternoon (what a way to spend a birthday, eh?). This is the Linux newsletter, a synopsis of the past week's articles on ONLamp.com. Let's get right down to business:

Oracle's a big Linux fan these days. The reality of great big corporate support, however, is that it takes quite a bit of testing on quite narrow criteria to say "It will work." While neither Red Hat nor Oracle will officially admit that Oracle 9i will run just fine on Red Hat 9, it will. Roko Roic's Installing Oracle on Red Hat will show you how to jump through the right hoops to high-powered relational database goodness.

Depending on how paranoid you are as a system administrator, you've probably come across the idea that separate applications should play in separate sandboxes. chroot only goes so far. FreeBSD's jails do this idea one better. Mike DeGraw-Bertsch explains more in FreeBSD Jails.

A common metaphor for email is the postal letter, though security-minded folk love to point out that a better example is the postcard. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to use encryption to make client-to-server and user-to-user communications much more secure. Robert Bernier explains several approaches in Encrypted Email Cookbook.

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This week's featured book excerpt comes from the recently released TiVo Hacks (which, unfortunately for your editor, did not come bundled with a new TiVo). Hack #58: Using the TiVo Control Station explains how to display sports scores, weather information, and more on your TiVO—-as well as controlling any other hack you have installed.

Our weblogs this week see Nat Torkington pointing at copyright lengths for classic bestsellers; William Grosso exposing exploitative startups; Andy Oram thinking maybe smart mobs aren't always; and Dee-Ann LeBlanc providing A SCO-Fighting Press Kit.

That's all for this week. Join us again next week when we catch up with Xbox Hacker Bunnie Huang.

Until then,

chromatic
chromatic@oreilly.com
Technical Editor
O'Reilly Network

ONLamp.com and Linux Devcenter Top Five Articles Last Week

FreeBSD Jails
A common security breach involves exploiting one application to gain access to another. Keeping separate applications separate can limit the potential damage. Mike DeGraw-Bertsch explains how FreeBSD's jails can help secure necessary applications.
portupgrade
One of FreeBSD's biggest benefits is its ports collection. Perhaps the most important ports utility is portupgrade. Dru Lavigne demonstrates how you can get the most out of your ports collection.
Five Lessons Open Source Developers Should Learn from Extreme Programming
It may be harder to see how Extreme Programming (XP) can apply to open source projects, especially those without a formal customer. But to build a successful open source project, you must solve many of the same problems you'd face with an in-house project. Here chromatic, author ofExtreme Programming Pocket Guide, offers five lessons open source developers can learn from XP.
Guido van Rossum Speaks
Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, recently announced a move from PythonLabs to Elemental Security. Steve Holden caught up with Guido to talk about the move, the future of Python, and computer programming for everybody.
Five Habits for Successful Regular Expressions
For many programmers, writing regular expressions is a black art. They stick to the features they know and hope for the best. Tony Stubblebine, author of Regular Expression Pocket Reference, says programmers can avoid a lot of trial and error by adopting these five habits for regular expression development. The code examples in this article use Perl, PHP, and Python, but the advice Tony espouses is applicable to nearly any regex implementation.